Haus der Kulturen der Welt | Annual programme 2020 with all dates

In 2020, the HKW will intensify its examination of the pressing questions of the present and their historical conditions in a multitude of programmes with very diverse and specific thematic settings: The HKW presents the sensational reconstruction of the picture atlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg (together with the Gemäldegalerie) and proclaims the Bildungsherbst, it asks about the singing behaviour of nightingales in the zoo and explores digital archives in order to explore past, present and to bring the future into dialogue.

The long-term projects that have been shaping the image of the HKW as a house of contemporary research since 2013 will be linked together in 2020 and continuously developed – from the Anthropocene to The New Alphabet.

After the one-year field research project Mississippi. Anthropocene River, which was completed in November 2019 with a campus in New Orleans, this year’s Anthropocene Curriculum will focus on the practical aspects of the complex interplay between humans, nature and technology. Under the title The Shape of a Practice, the campus format, which will take place in the fall of 2020, will open up an experimental learning space in which, among other things, it will be examined how (digital) infrastructures and tools can serve as practices of shared and shared knowledge production.

In 2020, the HKW is showing the comprehensive reconstruction of the Mnemosyne picture atlas of Aby Warburg. This exhibition project is the first time that the comprehensive collection of plates with Warburg’s original pictorial material is shown. These navigate the history of images and art from the Renaissance to contemporary culture and span an arc from questions of archiving and themes of mapping to a new approach to canonized images and practices of sampling. Aby Warburg, an art and cultural historian fascinated by the technical innovations of his time, created with his picture atlas almost a century ago not only a fundamental contribution to today’s image and media studies, but also early patterns and visual techniques for the digitally influenced present.

The HKW will be setting a further thematic accent this autumn with the exhibition Bildungsschock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, the participatory project Education in Concrete, and the third edition of the successful Schools of Tomorrow format in cooperation with ten Berlin schools. With the Bildungsherbst, the HKW is exploring the diversity of historical and current constellations of learning spaces and knowledge architectures and also aims to stimulate speculative thinking about tomorrow’s learning. The Sputnik Shock of 1957 was followed by an educational explosion and a brief epoch of experiments. Today, the focus is not only on the insight into the limitations of the Western world view and the global interdependencies of this educational offensive, but also on the questions of future forms of education, learning environments and knowledge mediation are once again being asked in a very fundamental way in view of the current transformations.

Based on the realization that the experiences of loss and new beginnings, departure and arrival, and life in transition are fundamental to German post-war history, the Archive of Flight project creates a space for oral histories that have been largely unheard of until now. In what forms can contemporary society deal with the complex and diverse narratives of migration experiences that shape it? What possibilities for a lively and detailed archive arise from the personal experiences of people who have fled and migrated? The Archive of Flight is both a digital place of memory and a questioning of the self-image of German society.

The festival Wassermusik has been a fixed point of the Berlin open-air season for over ten years. In 2020 the Mississippi sets the pace: The river, which crosses the USA from north to south and on whose banks people settled thousands of years ago, a traffic artery for plantation farming and slavery, a prime example of an anthropocene landscape, is also the cradle of American music: jazz and funk originated in New Orleans, the blues in its delta, rock’n’roll in Memphis. The festival presents the entire spectrum of Mississippi music: jazz, funk, blues, Cajun, Zydeco, R&B, folk, bluegrass and old and new hybrids – such as bounce or trailer trap.

After the impulses that the HKW has given in the past decade – for example with the Anthropocene Project – the house would like to continue to critically accompany the global-local connections and challenges of the present in the coming decade. Since the aim must be to see the world in a new light, artistic-aesthetic procedures play a prominent role. In addition to the sensual distinctiveness of the new phenomena, it is also a matter of their ethical classification, which must be practiced in social and political practices. In this sense, the HKW sees itself as a rehearsal stage for the 21st century.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as by the Federal Foreign Office. The New Alphabet (2019-2021) is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag. Anthropocene Curriculum is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag and by the Federal Foreign Office. HKW is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as by the Federal Foreign Office.
Archive of Refuge is a project by Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The online archive and the production of the filmed interviews is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as by the Federal Foreign Office.